Cost Analysis of Current Grids and Its Implications for Future Grid Markets

Commercial Grid markets have been a topic of research for many years. Many claims about the advantages of trading computing resources on markets have been made. However, due to a lack of Grid computing offerings, these claims could not be verified. This paper analyzes the question whether using the Grid is financially advantageous, using the Amazon.com EC2 service as a reference. To perform this analysis, the costs of computing resources in different usage scenarios are calculated, if Grid resources and in-house resources are used. The comparison of the costs reveals that while the Grid is cheaper in the short term, it is not a good investment in the long term and, thus, the existence of a Grid economy will not lead to an end of ownership but rather to a reduction in in-house resources and more efficient resource usage.